The University Hospital Compassion Statue

To hospital again for a routine follow up to ensure that I will be able to annoy people for many years to come. It is usually surrounded by hospital staff smoking or children laughing at the willy, but unusually I managed to get a picture of the Compassion statue today.
It was moved to the Queen Elizabeth site after Selly Oak hospital closed:

A Source distinctive bronze sculpture based on the Good Samaritan parable has found a permanent new home at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham (QEHB) after more than half a century.

The Compassion statue, which depicts one man aiding another, had been a familiar feature for patients, staff and visitors to Selly Oak Hospital since it was erected outside the main outpatients department in 1963.

Following the transfer of outpatient services to the new QEHB in Edgbaston, the sculpture was carefully loaded by crane onto a truck in April before being taken away for restoration.

The statue was created by sculptor Uli Nimptsch after a commission in 1961 by The Charles Henry Foyle Trust, who donated it to Selly Oak Hospital. The Foyle Trust provided benches for the public and maintained the statue until the hospital’s clinical services moved in 2010. They subsequently made a donation for the cost of relocating the statue to its new location.

It has now been restored and given a new home alongside the pedestrian walkway between QEHB and University rail station.

Graham Hackett, Estates and Design Manager at University Hospitals Birmingham, which runs QEHB, said: “The Compassion statue holds a lot of affection for people who worked at Selly Oak, visitors and the wider community, so we have effectively moved a large slice of Selly Oak to the new hospital site.”

The sculpture was taken to a firm of conservation specialists to be restored.

Mr Hackett added: “There were quite a number of chips which needed repairing, and the statue was also set on bronze dowels set into the plinth which had cracked and needed fixing. But the main restoration work consisted of cleaning and waxing.”

As well as planning permission, UHB also needed to obtain consent from English Heritage to relocate the sculpture as the site is located within the Metchley Roman fort site, which is a Scheduled Ancient Monument. 

Incidentally the Roman Fort connection makes this area of the city one of the most haunted, in the Hound's humble opinion. Incidentally I didn't think I had heard of Kirkup, the poet quoted on the plinth, but on further examination he gets my approbation for iconoclastic action:

In June 1976, Gay News published his poem The Love that Dares to Speak Its Name, in which a Roman centurion expresses the sexual fantasies the body of Christ provokes in him and imagines a history of Christ's homosexual encounters. Mary Whitehouse sued the newspaper for blasphemous libel. Gay News was defended by John Mortimer and both Bernard Levin and Margaret Drabble gave evidence on its behalf, but the jury decided in favour of Whitehouse. The newspaper and its editor, Denis Lemon (of whom Kirkup was later to write an obituary), were fined, and Lemon was given a nine-month suspended sentence. Source

True to form  while I am sitting on a bench writing this post the nearby busker has started playing one of my tunes. Just call me Godfather.